American politics

The presidential election

The big choice

WRITING at the New York Times' philosophy blog, Gary Gutting, a professor of philosophy at Notre Dame, tries his best to carefully and fairly characterise the choice facing American voters in their upcoming presidential election. Mr Gutting maintains, plausibly enough, that the choice amounts to a referendum on how best to realise the aims of the post-New Deal welfare state. He writes:

A vote for Obama endorses what has been the governing structure of our society since the New Deal: a free-market system balanced with government regulations, tax-funded social programs and legislative and judicial guarantees of civil rights—all to protect citizens from the excesses of the private sphere.

The current Republican Party is committed to replacing this structure with one that seriously reduces the role of government. The idea is to rely primarily on the private sphere to regulate itself and to solve social problems through increased production and wealth. Although a President Romney might resist his party’s base, there is a good chance that, willingly or not, he would mostly follow the official party commitments. Therefore, a vote for Romney may well be a vote for a major change in the longstanding role of government in our society. This is the new American revolution urged by the Tea Party.

Mr Gutting's attempt to describe the choice is valiantly even-handed, but it falls short nevertheless. His account of the significance of a vote for Mr Obama is too general; the same could be truly said of a vote for Mr Romney. And Mr Gutting's main claim about the commitments of the current Republican Party rings false. The GOP is not, in fact, committed to replacing "a free-market system balanced with government regulations, tax-funded social programs and legislative and judicial guarantees of civil rights" with "one that seriously reduces the role of government". It would be better to say that the Republican Party is committed to a handful of mostly empty rhetorical tropes about reducing the role of government, much as the Democratic Party is committed to a handful of mostly empty rhetorical tropes about greater socio-economic equality.

Nor am I aware of a tendency among Republicans to "rely primarily on the private sphere to regulate itself" when they actually govern. The greatest pro-market deregulator of my lifetime is Jimmy Carter, and the most controversial deregulatory move in recent memory may be Bill Clinton's support for repeal of those elements of the Glass-Steagall Act limiting the participation of commercial banks in securities markets. Meanwhile, neither voucherising Medicare nor recasting Social Security as a forced savings programme, as many Republicans are wont to do, is a way of reducing the role of government. There are some real differences between Democrats and Republicans over the best means of managing America's social-insurance state, and these differences have something to do with varying opinions about the merits of central administration versus private property and consumer choice as organising principles. Still, it's important to keep in mind that, in advanced economies, markets generally are creatures of legislation and regulation, and that the planned markets around voucherised transfers and mandated investments are doubly so. The virtues of these schemes, such as they are, are the virtues of a certain style of big-government administration, not the virtues of markets operating in anarchy.

It's an occupational hazard of philosophy to see significant philosophical differences behind partisan rivalries. Luckily, America's two mainstream political parties are not actually very ideological. They continue to exist as competitive parties because they are doggedly devoted to the service of their constitutive jumble of interest groups. Philosophy in mature party democracy serves a mainly rhetorical, public-relations role. If you wish to understand the real choice between Mr Obama and Mr Romney, try to look past their parties' branding campaigns and look instead to history and the make-up of each party's coalition. For example, if Mr Romney manages to win, he'll have older white Americans to thank. Thus, if you want to know what Mr Romney is likely to do with respect to Medicare, ask yourself how older white Americans feel about Medicare reform.

What most of us think we're endorsing at the polls is mainly a function of partisan branding. Admittedly, it's rather more fun to vote expressively—to make a statement to oneself about the kind of person one likes to imagine oneself to be—than to vote based on a realistic appraisal of the actual difference between the candidates' approaches to governance. So I suppose it's not really surprising that political commentators offer us almost no help at all in making such appraisals. There's no demand! Unionised teachers don't want to think of themselves as voting Democratic because Democrats protect the interests of unionised teachers, just as rich people don't want to think of themselves as voting Republican because Republicans protect the interests of rich people. We like to see ourselves as voting according to conscience. The branding function of philosophy in politics is to give individual conscience a form congruent with group interest, to transform the mathematical necessities of coalitional partisan politics into many millions of separate acts of self-congratulating private virtue. It's a neat trick. It would be neater still if fewer pundits played along.

Which is one reason why I voted for Perot in '92-- a public debt of $4T was simply unconscionable. Fortunately, it didn't grow much over $4T for the next decade. Apparently, some fiscal loose spenders made their way into making policy at it's ballooned ever since, although in the face of a 9% recession in 2009, not spending would have been akin to economic suicide.

I'm an older white American just recently qualified for Medicare, and don't see Romney as someone who can be trusted to anything sensible to protect Medicare or to follow policies in the interests of aging Americans generally. His advocacy for repeal of the Affordable Care Act exemplifies this. I just see him as someone who is so wealthy that the problem of providing for the aged just doesn't affect him personally.

Good, perhaps, but hardly startling. After all, on any objective measure, Obama is a center-right (i.e. moderately conservative) politician. And given a choice between a moderate conservative and far-right ideologues, what else would you expect a moderate libertarian like WW to do? He might prefer a candidate who would shrink government, but he is not going to support one who demands intruding government into personal and private behavior.

American elections are just a joke, a farce, an illusion of choice. These 2 men are like Coke and Pepsi while there are dozens of drinks to choose from. Mainstream media boycotted third-party candidates' debates hosted by Larry King and only broadcast by secondary networks, and Obamney refused to participate, too. Any of the 4 non-Obamney alternatives would make the world a much safer place. It's just a shame the "free western media" boycotts them.

Hey, have you heard? A Northeastern Republican is running! Say what you will of Romney, but he's got class like Rockefeller and temperance like Molly Hatchet. That's what people seem to not like about him. Romney has that classic old-school republican tone-deaf virtue in spades, "why a regiment of coloreds! how grand! let us throw a jubilee". Christie comes off more as a LaGuardia, but that's a different sort. Can you imagine Romney reading us the funnies?
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As for Eisenhower, I wish either candidate had the same respect for the law that got him to deploy the paratroopers to uphold a court ruling. Random killing seems to be the fad now. However, if Obama wins we still get the Eisenhower legacy of big government, big union, and big business corporatism, and random non-congressionally sanctioned regime changes.

That cynicism and attempted irony is cute, but ignorant. The most important shift of regulatory policy was the creation of OIRA by President Reagan, which ensured that all new regulation be subject to cost-benefit analysis.

You're right that people underrate interest vs ideology. But ideology IS still there. It's just much more prone to stalemate. The parties' pro and anti-market views cancel each other out a lot of the time. Their rent-seeking proclivities do not, and so it's easier to observe the latter.

Obama has run on a campaign of Romney's worse and vise-versa. So the only choice facing American voters in the presidential contest is do you prefer not-Obama or not-Romney. The question before us, do we believe in "I dunno, maybe" or "I dunno." Personally, my soul sings the more optimistic message of the former position.

This is what is at contest and what the result will express once the people have mumbled.